Senior Counselor
Chief Government Affairs Officer
Conway Collis is Senior Counselor and Chief Government Affairs Officer for Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS). He helps address the full range of issues affecting the DCHS local health ministries and the Daughters’ mission of serving and advocating for low-income Californians. He also represents DCHS before Congress, the state legislature and other public forums. Prior to joining DCHS full time in 2005, he was president of Collis Associates which provided public policy counsel to public and private sector clients. Collis Associates was the public policy counsel to DCHS since the health system’s inception in 2001.
Collis previously served as an elected member and chairman of the California State Board of Equalization, a domestic policy advisor to U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, and a committee counsel in the U.S. Senate.
As a counsel to the U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and domestic policy advisor to U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, Collis was responsible for advising on federal domestic policy issues including poverty, health and social and legal services. He later served as founding executive director of the principal fundraising arm of the U.S. Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.
Collis was elected to the California State Board of Equalization, California’s governing tax and revenue agency, in 1982. Re-elected in 1986, he served as Chairman of the Equalization Board, overseeing an agency with over 1500 employees in 57 offices. He wrote and sponsored a number of new laws and regulations, including the State Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, tax credits for employer-sponsored childcare, and the elimination of tax benefits for discriminatory private clubs. He also led the implementation of a broad modernization and reform of the state tax bureaucracy. While on the Board, Collis chaired a major 1986 statewide voter registration drive, registering nearly 300,000 voters, and was the proponent of a 1988 statewide initiative to address housing and homelessness. In 2001, he served as Chairman of the California State Senate Bipartisan Task Force on Homelessness.
Most recently, Collis proposed and was the principle organizer of the Medi-Cal provider fee (AB 1383 by Dave Jones, D-Sac) on behalf of DCHS, which is projected to generate $3.5 billion to provide health care to low- income Californians and over $300 million for children’s health care.
Collis is currently a member of the state First Five Commission (the California State Commission on Children and Families), and serves on the boards of Kids In Sports, the Alliance for Catholic Healthcare and Private Essential Access Community Hospitals.
Collis graduated with honors from Occidental College in 1970 and Stanford Law School in 1974.